Hope Bimbo is doing ok at hospital, here's my tenpence worth....
I think this is an interesting and quite brave choice on BH’s part.
I love synths of all shapes and sizes, or to be more specific I love 90% of the synths I’ve ever heard and the sounds they create, with a bit of a preference for old school beefy analogue monos. Within the 10% I am less keen on is the synth that was the first massively successful digital poly synth; it is also in my personal opinion the most despicable synth ever produced: the Yamaha DX7.
My single biggest fear when I got my kids into 80’s music was that they would discover the presets on the ubiquitous DX7 and actively like the sounds that it made. I needn’t have worried, big son is in thrall to by Martin Hannett’s production techniques and little son basically likes post punk guitar bands of all shapes and sizes.
However, the young people who make synthwave
do love the DX7 and its ilk because it’s the quintessential sound of a certain type of 80’s electronic music, the kind that is accompanied by saxophones mic’d in that equally 80’s style. The kind that accompanies moody looking actors in neon lit scenes. They look backwards but not to the wonder of something like Vince Clarke’s Prophet 3 but to the lusher sounds of the likes of Jan Hammer with his DX****ing7 (or less egregiously, Nick Rhodes on his Jupiter 8). This is the type of synth sound that synthwave uses to build upon and in this regard The Midnight are no different from other synthwave bands.
So where does this leave me in relation to this album? On paper I should hate it with every fibre of my being. Which I sort of do, except I don’t really for a variety of reasons:
- They can, sometimes, actually write decent songs. There’s basically two types of tracks on here the soundtrack style ones and the more pop song style that Blinding Lights took its cue from years later. They are better at the latter than the former in my view, the former being stunningly had to pull off well outside of the associated visuals etc.
- By all accounts they can play live in a very warm and engaging fashion and are focused on building a bit of a sense of community with their fans.
But probably the main reason I can’t bring myself to hate it to the degree their numpty aesthetic choices would normally drive me to is that they are genuine in their motives. They are also quite painstaking in their approach and authentic in their creativity. There is a great irony here in that this stands in direct contrast to the approach of the originators of the music they find inspiration from.
Because the thing is, my characterisation of the DX7 was entirely unfair. The real issue with the DX7 wasn’t that it was the synth of the devil, but that as the first readily available but powerful digital synth of its kind pretty much the only professional musician on the face of the earth who could be arsed to work out how to actually use it properly was Brian Eno. Every other bloody producer/musician under the sun decided it was all a bit too complicated and that the presets were absolutely fine for what they needed, hence years of the diabolic e1.piano preset sound and it’s default bass, drum and guitar presets dominating all sorts of songs.
When the British analogue vanguard took the leap into digital, they continued the ‘hard yards’ approach with the likes of the Fairlight; whilst in the US an army of slick willie producers and musos, even the talented ones, decided to just pan the life out of things like the DX7 defaults. This, IMO, is why so much of the early synth music that was produced by so called ‘non-musicians’, much derided by certain types of music fans, is so much better than the stuff the ‘proper’ musicians were producing. The new kids came to the technology with a curiosity and tenacity to see what it could do whereas lots of existing musicians just couldn’t be arsed to learn the new ways.
I’m no Durannie but for all that Nick Rhodes might have needed stickers on his keyboard for the notes, he was also one of the early adopters of some of the seminal synths and kit like the CMI and he should be applauded for that pioneering spirit. More in my wheelhouse, Vince Clarke freely admits that when Martin Gore turned up with a synth, they all thought ‘well this looks easier than learning guitar chords’ but that is self-deprecation of the highest order because if you listen, for example, to some of Upstairs at Eric’s and consider some of the tracks were made using nothing more than a
single analogue mono synth then it becomes a work of near genius. I won’t bang on about NO on this front too or we’ll be here all day.
There were the occasional members of the old guard who were experimenters (like Eno and in fairness Hammer sometimes) but then there would be a massive pile on of similar generic pap which the 80’s particularly in the US is littered with. A toolkit of about 30 ‘iconic’ sounds got absolutely everywhere. Anyone who has ever heard the opening bars of Somewhere Out There and wanted to gouge their own eyes out, well you’ve got the abuse of the DX7 to thank for that.
It was similar on the soundtrack front which is obviously where a lot of synthwave inspiration comes from. Vangelis produced something special for Bladerunner but (a) Vangelis knew what he was doing and (b) he had more equipment both analogue and digital than you could shake a stick at. He also spawned a legion of pale imitations that were blessed with neither (a) or (b).
Which is a roundabout way of saying that when the sounds come out of the speaker when I play this album, my emotional reflex is not to want to roll up my jacket sleeves Crockett style but to stab something.
However, my brain then kicks in and I consider that these are not lazy twats sticking on a bunch of presets but committed musicians with a wholesome desire to utilise sounds of the past for a new deliberately naïve and nerdy sub-genre and then I find it hard to muster the same contempt that I have for the originators of some of this stuff. This despite that fact that I think they are trying to create references back to an era of musical innocence that didn’t actually exist or have at least picked the wrong role models from that era. Add in that The Midnight can write and play too, which might be a surprise given how much time they spend creating their music using software plugins, along with that sense of community I previously mentioned and paradoxically the whole thing is much more human than a genre name like synthwave would conjure.
All that said nothing, but nothing can excuse the sax on here or pretty much in any of synthwave; it’s alright to be nostalgic but no one looks back fondly on rickets do they?
There are some synthwave bands that would absolutely have been getting a 2 or 3 for being annoying twats but The Midnight isn’t one of them. I might think they are misguided but when they stick to the poppy stuff they’re ok and I hope and suspect when you go to see them BH you will have a great time.
5.5 /10
